Partners’ personality types and mate preferences: predation risk matters

Abstract

Mate choice is known as an important behavior allowing females to choose the best mate to increase their reproductive success. To estimate male quality, females can use multiple traits. Among those, recent studies have shown that male personality traits could play an important role in mate choice as they are often linked to major life-history traits and can be heritable. However, because the relationships between life-history traits and personality traits are context dependent, females are expected to choose male personality types according to the mating context. In this study on common lizards (Zootoca vivipara), we examined the role of personality traits in female mate choice and mating behavior after experimentally manipulating the predation risk experienced by females prior to mating. We showed that females not exposed to predator cues preferred males with high-activity level, a heritable behavior. When females are exposed to predator cues prior to mating, this preference was reversed. High-activity levels generally increase competitive abilities and survival but could be detrimental when predators are present. Our results suggest that female common lizards choose males based on their personality types and can modify their preferences according to their environmental context in order to produce offspring that are better adapted to their environment.